Like most ethics questions, I'd consider this area a matter of degrees. We probably have an easier time saying that ensuring your child's health and integrity i

Like most ethics questions, I'd consider this area a matter of degrees. We probably have an easier time saying that ensuring your child's health and integrity is an ethical endeavor. Maximizing your child's stats on the other hand is probably questionable, not only because this has been associated with evil in the past, but also because we're not really all that good at judging consequences. With this, somewhat tenuous, idea of the upper end of the ethical spectrum in mind, it's easier to see that intentionally hurting your child is bad. Again, at the most extreme end, the bottom is made up of people who commit a willful physical act to rob their child of health and happiness. This is quite common post birth, but now it's also increasingly feasible to do in the womb. I'd say removing a child's hearing is in the same league as, say, removing a child's genitals (which is also common in large parts of the world). It's a malevolent act designed to rob your child of some aspect of its humanity, and the motives are also similar ("I want my child to be the same as me!", "I think it's better that way"). Slightly towards the gray area of the spectrum, but still by far on the negative side, are in my opinion people who willingly and intentionally pass on catastrophic genes to their children. It's really not all that different, except I'd compare it more to shooting a person with a weapon at a distance, where the former examples are more like pulling a knife and butchering someone with your own hands (in some cases literally). Now, your second question is the most interesting in my opinion. Is creating a child ethical at all because its suffering and eventual premature death seems predestined anyway? I'd argue that life - even at our current, very limited tech level - is indeed worth living and all things considered a positive thing. As badly designed as we are by nature, we're still a comparatively nice and diverse organism with amazing capabilities. And for a child born today, I hope that senescence will become a solvable problem within its lifetime.